There was, way back in the mists of... 2007... a recurrent meme among several comics art blogs. Reclaiming characters from their owners, I guess it could be broadly described as... people were reimagining abused characters (chiefly Supergirl) as artistic call-and-response in various places, chiefly LiveJournal. In the aftermath of that, I did a similar thing on old messageboard The Engine, called REMAKE/REMODEL. They were embraced as technical exercises, bits of fun, ways to get the brain moving. I think most people's favourite was the dear late Mike Wieringo's wondrous retro-aristo Buck Rogers...

I thought it might be an interesting thing to bring back here. So, once a week, I'll call a character, and you art types here can post images of your reinterpretation of that character. Photography and digital art is also fine, before anyone asks.

The point is REinterpretation: remake/remodel.

This week: Captain Justice. Jess Nevins has the gen:

"Captain Justice was created by Murray Roberts and appeared in Modern Boy and Boys Friend Library beginning with "Captain Justice--Modern Pirate" in the November 1930 issue of Modern Boy. Justice sounds interesting; I wish some of his stories were easily available to read. Jack Adrian described him as "a cross between Cutcliffe Hyne's Captain Kettle and Sidney Drew's Ferrers Lord," and, indeed, his is quite visibly similar to Captain Kettle, enough so that one would be forgiven for suspecting a familial relation."

This is the only image I could find of Captain Justice.

I could find none at all of Captain Kettle, his supposed lookylikey. But listen:

"Captain Justice is the "Sea Rover," a "modern pirate," as mentioned, an "adventurer of the highest order" whose home base, a technological wonder (it had two-way television in it), was a mile-high fortress, Titanic Tower, floating somewhere in the Atlantic. He used an invisible airship to take him and his friends, Midge the red-headed boy assistant (think Sexton Blake's Tinker and Nelson Lee's Nipper) and Professor Flaznagel, around the world, from hidden cities to the depths of the Sahara, and to fight evil and wrong-doers wherever he found them. This often entailed, for example, confronting evil Sheiks who used armies of giant spiders, or going to Lost Worlds and fighting "hordes of prehistoric monsters," or saving the Earth from alien invasions, or stopping renegade Americans and evil Sheikhs from conquering the world. There were drowned worlds coming to the surface, and technologically advanced Lost World natives in the Amazon threatening to invade the outer world, and Cap took them on. There were the evil androids of "Robot City," and the ill-inclined inhabitants of a Lost World in India, and even the "Weed Men" from the Sargasso Sea, and Cap took them on, too. There were boy Rajahs from places like Bhuristan, who of course needed restoring to their rightful thrones, stolen from them by evil viziers, and Cap helped them. There were monster robots on South Seas islands and lost civilizations beyond the Arctic ice and dinosaurs in volcano-heated lands beyond the Antarctic ice...

(Now I'm editing:) "....metal cubes with unnatural powers, "priceless electric ore." There were cannibals and pygmies in unexplored Africa... Marcus the Mysterious, who planned on becoming the "Emperor of Earth" fish-humanoids... the unwelcome attentions of the inhabitants of the planet Nuvius, who brought not only themselves but their entire planet to attack Earth. There was the Black Napoleon of Science City, out to conquer the world..." Screw it, I'd be here all day. This is mad stuff.

Consider the single image. Consider the text.

What we're looking at here is essentially Doktor Popeye from the 25th Century.

Go insane. It's what Captain Justice would have wanted.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with, but bear in mind this is an ART thread, and pen-portraits and other texts will be deleted. (And if you don't know what a pen-portrait is, go back to your school and insist that they provide you with a proper education.)

Dammit. This is the part where my half-assed drawing skills come back to bite me because I have an awesome image in my head that I can't possibly draw. Somewhere between a deranged Spider Jerusalem and a less-wooden Neo, with a flying ship and explosions.

Because explosions are cool.

I'll probably work on it, and maybe get it in by the end of the week. Maybe.

What we're looking at here is essentially Doktor Popeye from the 25th Century.

Heh. I was waiting for that tagline.

This one is gonna take some thinky-time, just to come up with something other than Punchy, the Generic-Pulp-Adventurer and his sidekicks Sexually-Non-Threatening-Boy and Sexually-Non-Threatening-Old-Smart-Dude... because this is really, really something very different.

Forgive the lack of detail on backgrounds and on the Titanic Tower (here portrayed as a huge spacecraft), but my scanner's broken and I had to draw this with a mouse on Macromedia Flash 8. The sky is the only thing that wasn't drawn, but trace bitmapped from this picture.

it is a challenge but that's what makes it fun. much like with irma vep, the original design is so strong i'm hesitant to change it up. i plan on giving it a shot once i've finished my WFH pages for the day.

I think this is a great one to do, work however hinders starting new pictures right away. I really like the character and think it will be interesting to see peoples various interpretations since there is only 1 background image to go off of. I'll have something up hopefully sooner than later as well. I do love this whole remodel/remake notion though and the images it produces.